subject: Passenger Pigeon, A Forgotten Ghost [print this page] Perhaps that is why in this time of fleeting glimpses of Ivory Bills and now oil-sodden brown pelicans, I decided to take a moment to remember a bird long forgotten-whose fate happened to throw in with the birth of industrialization, of a thriving timber industry, and the disregard of most of America. No doubt, it would've been incompatible with us in its sheer numbers, its dung falling like snow across hundreds of miles of forest. No pilot could've maneuvered through millions of birds in flocks that took days to pass. Today, the passenger pigeon would, no doubt, meet with the same fate. Conditions in the 21st century are even less tolerant for birds that cannot adapt to that tenuous edge between threatened and extinct-a convenient place to keep a species when flourishing might mean a clear and natural "inconvenience." More than most other extinctions, this particular bird provided a glorious show, then an even more glorious disappearance. Mute and caged, the long-lived Martha gave her life to scrutiny, and when she died in September 1914 the pronouncement of "Extinct Species" was heard round the world. Like the pandemic that followed, it still haunts some of us even now, all these many years later.
